Azure Cost Calculators

Azure prices several things on a different basis from AWS, and the differences are exactly where estimates go wrong for people who learned cloud cost on the other platform.

Managed disks are the clearest example. AWS bills EBS per GB provisioned, so waste accumulates gradually and proportionally. Azure bills a managed disk by SKU: a P30 costs the same holding one gigabyte as holding its full 1,024, and a 600 GiB requirement is billed as a P30 because the SKU below stops at 512. A disk sitting just over a boundary costs exactly as much as one sitting far over it, which makes the cheapest fix frequently "delete forty gigabytes" rather than "change tier".

Blob storage adds a trap S3 does not have. Both charge for retrieval and both enforce minimum durations, but where S3 pro-rates the remainder, Azure levies a published early-delete fee per gigabyte. On short-lived data that fee can consume the entire storage saving that motivated the tiering in the first place.

And on VMs, the largest lever is one this site models honestly rather than optimistically: Spot rates here are real published figures, so those savings are exact, while reservation discounts are shown as a band because Azure's public price API does not expose them. Azure Hybrid Benefit — the biggest Azure-specific discount of all — is deliberately not modelled, because it applies to Windows licensing and every rate here is Linux.

These rates are generated from the Azure Retail Prices API rather than typed in by hand, so the verification date is the date a script ran.